As Democratic senator James Webb pointed out in a recent speech on the Senate floor: ‘We have five per cent of the world’s population; we have 25 per cent of the world’s known prison population.

We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world’s greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the average incarceration rate of the rest of the world.

There are only two possibilities: either we have the most evil people on Earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice.’